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Notes -
Do you?
There's the assumption that FOOM = godhood = instant obliteration of incumbents who didn't maximally improve themselves. I am not convinced. Like Beff says, meta-learning is very compute-intensive, you can't just spin it up in a pool of sunlit dirt and expect quick gains. In a world packed with many players having good understanding of the issue and superhumanly powerful tool AIs (I don't want to say «aligned» because alignment because it's a red herring born out of Yud's RL-informed theory, the desirable and achievable regime is «no alignment necessary»), a hostile agentic superintelligence will have trouble covertly procuring resources and improving itself to the point it becomes a threat (or becomes able to hide sufficiently well). This is a plausible stable state without a centralized Panopticon, and in my understanding what OpenAI initially intended to achieve. Analogies to e.g. human terrorism are obvious.
Moreover, what you present is the weak form of the argument. The strong form of Yuddism is «we need to get it right on the first try», often repeated. I've written before that it should re read with the straussian method (or rather, just in the context of his other writing), as the instruction to create a Singleton who'll take it from there in the direction humanity (actually Yud) approves. Explicitly, though, it's a claim that the first true superintelligence will certainly be hostile unless aligned by design – and that strong claim is, IMO, clearly bogus, crucially dependent on a number of obsolete assumptions.
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